Clearview AI Scraped Your Face. The Government Is Using It. There Are Almost No Rules.

In 2020, a Kashmir Hill investigation for the New York Times revealed that a startup called Clearview AI had scraped 3 billion photos from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and millions of other websites — without consent — and built a facial recognition tool that law enforcement agencies were quietly using to identify suspects. Today, Clearview AI's database has grown to over 50 billion images . Over 3,100 law enforcement agencies in the United States have used it. The company has expanded to government agencies in dozens of countries. There is no federal law preventing this. There is no opt-out. There is no way to know if your face is in the database. And there is no way to know if law enforcement has run your photo through it. This is the state of government AI surveillance in 2026. How Clearview Works The technology is conceptually simple. Clearview scrapes photos from the open web — social media profiles, news articles, LinkedIn pages, corporate websites, arrest records, any